Team Canada takes over the sushi house

Sushi chef peeling the root veggie

Me at sushi

Well, the Fall World Cups are completed.  Our final stop was in Nagano, Japan.  This is one of my favorite venues to skate at.  I have a friend who lives in Osaka, Japan.  When she came to watch me skate World Single Distance Championships in Nagano last year, she called it “the country”.  I thought that was pretty funny!  The population is about 130 000, which is pretty high here in Canada, but in Japan they consider it very small.  It is a nice city: quiet, calm and extremely clean.  When I go there it always feels a lot like home. 

This year our team was on a mission…SUSHI!  We wanted to get the real deal and not just the stuff they serve us at the hotel.  Our whole team got together and set off with directions from the front desk.  On the way to the first one that was on the list, we were lost.  What a surprise!  We quickly aborted that one and set off for the second one on the list.  Still we could not find that one.  Finally, with almost everyone giving up because of hunger, a man from a restaurant specializing in chicken, said he could help.  With little to no English to converse, we followed him for quite a few blocks.  He led us to a tiny little restaurant.  We thanked him (so nice!) and walked in.  It was an authentic Japanese sushi house.  The chef was standing behind the counter peeling a root vegetable into the longest, thinnest tape I’ve even seen.  We were the only ones there so we had the rule of the restaurant.  All we said was “sushi?” and they started serving.  We had scallop, octopus, tuna, and some fish none of us knew.  When we asked for salmon, he said that that is a Canadian thing.  I guess they don’t even serve it in Japan.  Who knew!  In the end it was a great experience.  We all signed a competition shirt and one of the girls dropped it off.  The owners, husband and wife, brought their kids and came to watch the competition on Sunday hands full of more sushi. 

As for skating, it is getting a little better.  I got new skates right before the competition in China, so with some getting accustomed, things started to get better at the end of the Nagano World Cup.  I am sad to say that the oval there is going to be shut down because of high costs to run it.  We are so lucky in Calgary that our oval is surviving!  I spent the week there with my eyes wide open, keeping the memories that I have gotten from there: my first World Sprint Championships, my first 100Yen shop, skating in the 1998 Olympic Oval, a special competition that Arne and I were competing at together, the list goes on!        

Okay, I’m off to Richmond for the Canadian Single Distance Championships.  Hopefully my flight will be taking off from Calgary at the right time on the right day! 

Merry Chistmas!

I write that in capital letters because that is what China is.  Big in every sense of the word.  The country is big, the population is big, the cities are big, the smells and tastes are big.  It is just big on the whole.  Beijing was the focus of the summer for anyone who cares at all about the Olympics.  For me, I was glued to the TV.  This was a different China than I was used to.  When we come for skating, we are always in the most northern tip where it is bitterly cold and a lot more industrial.  I have been to Harbin, China for one of my first World Cups.  This year we are just a little south in the city of Changchun, population: 7 million.  It was a little warmer and a lot less snowy.  The experience is nothing that I can describe unless you are here.  The atmosphere is suffocating when you are used to a small town in Saskatchewan.  For example, I knew it was 6 am when I heard the start of the non-stop honking that went on in the streets outside.  I am very open to new experiences, so I like to take in the differences.  The differences are not necessarily bad, they are the culture of the country. 

One of the funniest things we took part in was the shopping.  If you haven’t heard, the markets in China are crazy.  Some are underground and some are tucked away.  They are booth after booth of knock-offs.  It is quite mind blowing since you will see a purse that you can buy from Louis Vuitton for thoudsands of dollars and for the not so perfect knock-off, you can barter down to a few tens of dollars.  Depending on how good you are at bartering (I’m not), you can even get it for less.  At one point a woman I was haggling with followed me into another store to give me a new price, lower than I walked away from.  They are all equipped with calculators so that they can communicate the prices to the foreigners that are shopping.  It is quite the experience.

Unfortunately I had some problems with the new food and another new time zone.  Here’s to feeling better for the weekend coming up in Nagano, Japan!

ps. I, of course, did not buy any knock-offs, those are illegal…